Double vision at the Rose Art Museum

In their first American museum shows, Tom Sachs and Steve Miller peel away surfaces to look above and below for more intriguing realities.

Chris Bergeron

Director Michael Rush suggests visitors should "expect to be surprised" by two artists exploring the material and cellular worlds in challenging exhibits at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University.

In their first American museum shows, Tom Sachs and Steve Miller peel away surfaces to look above and below for more intriguing realities.

Sachs is showing 12 installations that resemble work stations in his own studio, nudging viewers to distinguish between the real and artificial in art as in life.

Translating biochemical discoveries onto his canvases, Miller has captured the mating dance of protein molecules that make life possible in 25 striking silk screened images.

Their shows, "Tom Sachs: Logjam" in the Foster Wing and "Steve Miller: Spiraling Inward" in the Rose Museum both run through Dec. 16.

Organized by the Des Moines Art Center, "Logjam" combines elements of "Extreme Home Makeover" and annoying domestic chores it's like an often funny, sometimes frustrating shop class where the teacher won't hand out the blueprints.

In pieces like "Outstanding Service Every Time" and "McMaster Toilet Paper Holder," viewers see makeshift objects from Sachs' studio, some modified for specific tasks.

Acting curator Adelina Jedrzejczak said Sachs, whose European shows earned critical acclaim, has forged a signature style of "bricolage," do-it-yourself pieces made from found or commonplace objects but invested with new uses and meanings.

By exhibiting studio work stations in a museum, Sachs seems to ask viewers to make a broad conceptual leap with him into personal and elusive meanings about the artist's role and the nature of creativity.

A more accessible installation, "Nutsy's Tableau," resembles a complex racetrack for remote-controlled Mini-Z Racers. Built from scratch by Sachs and his assistants, it includes a miniature repair station, beer cooler and a flaming "Ring of Fire" the little cars must drive through. Mixing the ominous and the playful, the installation includes a voyeuristic "Wall of Surveillance" of video monitors and a seemingly innocuous instructional video that details all the rules in Sachs' hermetic parallel world.

While Sachs' cleverly crafted installations pose provocative questions, some viewers might just wonder whether he's stretched the definition of art so thin as to make the piece's meaning absolutely subjective.

Rush said he understands some viewers might feel lost or disengaged trying to make sense of conceptual works that don't play by traditional rules of representational art.

"Go in with an open mind. Even if you feel, 'I don't get this,' take the next step and do some investigating," he said. Visitors who feel adrift can use available wall text and free guides to learn about Sachs' work.

Rush said Sachs and Miller are continuing the evolution of contemporary artists who've been venturing into creative terra incognita for decades.

"Since the 1960s, and especially since the days of Andy Warhol, the spectrum of art has broadened infinitely, which means almost anything can be considered art if a given artist decides this object or that idea is a work of art," he said.

The museum's director since 2005, Rush compared the creative principle driving Sachs' installations to Warhol's groundbreaking silk screen images of Campbell soup cans. "What these artists are doing is commenting on pop culture. This particularly pertains to Sachs who wants us to take a closer look at everyday objects. We all buy refrigerators but he makes them. He's putting the artist's touch on the everyday," he said.

Yet one can reasonably wonder if anything can be anointed as art, what about your cluttered garage or road kill on the Mass Pike? What distinguishes Sachs' conceptual art from your Aunt Ida who collects Hummels and invents charming stories about them?

Miller takes a different route, but one that is challenging in its own way.

Jedrzejczak said he spent the last five years working with Brandeis alumni and Nobel Laureate Rod MacKinnon "finding ways to translate" his biochemical research into art. A 1978 Brandeis graduate, MacKinnon won the 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering how a charged ion moves across cell membranes, a crucial process for certain life-saving medications.

Jedrzejczak said Miller's works represent an aesthetic not scientific response to one of living organisms' most basic functions.

Inspired by the scientist's notebooks, drawings and diagrams, Miller has created large canvas silk screens in which equations, math formulas and geometric patterns are superimposed over impressionistic constellations of color.

Rather than focus on artifice and consumerism like Sachs, Miller, Rush said, regards "science and technology as the new Pop language."

"He's using actual scientific research about what makes us tick and translating that research into the basis of his art," he said. "Miller shows viewers that research through the filter of contemporary art. We can literally have a feeling for science like any art."

For Rush, Miller's work provides "an extraordinary opportunity to explore this enormously important frontier between art and science."

"Few artists have been able to bring their own imaginative skills to a scientific processes the way (Miller) has," he said.

Rush urged visitors with traditional tastes to "take a minute" and approach both exhibits with "open minds" so they, like contemporary artists, can broaden their own artistic spectrum.

Citing avant-garde French artist Marcel Duchamp, Rush said, "The work of art is not complete without the viewer."

THE ESSENTIALS:

The Rose Art Museum, on the campus of Brandeis University in Waltham, is open Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Admission is $3.

The museum is closed Thursday and Friday, Nov. 22 and 23, in observance of Thanksgiving.

The galleries will close Dec. 17 for installation of new exhibits and reopen Jan. 24.